MARGINAL TRANSMISSION: BIG RELEASES
On Trilogy Writing, Album Reviews, JPEGMafia, and Wednesday
While I finish up the final two Kentucky Meat Showers for the “season”, I’ve decided, due to reasons I’ll be explaining in a bullet point, to do some small written ‘fragments’: notes on whatever comes up, non sequiturs, etc. This series will run whenever I feel like it.
One big mistake if you’re going to write a trilogy of essays is to spread out the release too far, especially if your regular intentions were to have them out one month after another. This is the mistake I have currently made, but it’s not an artistic mistake so much as an ease-of-reading mistake. The A Prophet of His Own trilogy of issues (which you can read about here, issue “one” is here, issue “two” is here, issue “three” is forthcoming) should have been decided to be written in advance. But we’re in the thick of it now, and I’m not going to change the release schedule this time.
Though I will say, because I am trending more towards ambitious work that will take some time to put out, and that means that after these two issues, I’ll be putting Kentucky Meat Shower aside until I get a series of thematically coherent, good issues prewritten. Of course, you’ll still be seeing me around in a few places, and I still plan on being around (though less so). The title
“Marginal Transmission” is to give myself permission to not focus on blowing people’s minds, to be stupid, to be disposable, to allow myself cheap comments, to be marginal. All the things I try not to do with Kentucky Meat Shower proper.Eli at Constantly Hating’s negative review of boygenius’s The Record blew up in its own way, inspiring rounds and rounds of discourse. Something I’ve found missing in this discussion: the rude, snotty tone of Eli’s review is simply a music fan version of craic, banter, and the dozens. It’s part and parcel for music fandom to include a little bit of shit talk, and the idea every review has to be a prim and proper affair where every idea is taken at face value as meaningful or worth discussing removes that social element, where we interact with the art we love and don’t love.
One reason I dislike poptimism so much (I’m probably late to this fight) is it enshrines the idea that things are both good and shouldn’t be treated as light and things are good because they are light. The level of importance that gets put to rock music is probably more than it can bear, and instead of evaluating the holy cows makes all cows holy. Most of the response I’ve seen to the boygenius review has been anger that it was even criticized. This is not Mozart or even jazz. We could all stand to not be so precious about our favorite rock music. "Rock & roll isn't even music really. It's a mistreating of instruments to get feelings over,” as Mark E. Smith said.
Of course, I do have to confess, I did give the first couple of songs on the album a shot and bailed by the third. Individually I’ve liked a few Phoebe Bridgers songs (even if I find her arrangements pretty wanting) and haven’t dived enough into the others to have any opinion. But I’ve been departing from American indie for awhile. It feels like alternative music that college students listen to, cannibalizing the same influences over and over. The genre has become readily suburban in a way it always has been, but it seems more evident to me now as a reflection of suburban mores. Most of what I hear when I hear the vast majority of guitar based indie rock feels specific to its audience, and I am not the audience.As far as big releases go, Danny Brown and Jpegmafia’s Scarin’ The Hoes Vol. 1 has dropped a few cuts onto my monthly playlists. It’s a fun album because Danny Brown and Peggy are, at the very least, good at rapping (Danny Brown is very good), and Peggy is a good producer. The album seems to fall under the Ghostface Killah rap classic formula:
Get the beats
Make sure they’re official
Say fly shit over them
Danny does the “fly shit” part very well. The beats are official: this is the first JPEG release I’ve enjoyed in awhile, in part because the beats are hard. But Peggy’s rapping is short of “fly shit” because of his overinsistence on ironycel internet humor. I laughed when he called himself “the black AOC”, sure. But some of it just comes across like it has the same life span as a tweet, tied to an ephemeral present. At its best, it gets a chuckle, but at its worse, it reminds you how badly some of those lyrics are going to age, and that’s the last thing I want to think about when I’m listening to a rap album.
Juxtapose that with the anarchic “debut” of RXK Nephew, Til I’m Dead. This isn’t the place to get into RXK Nephew’s whole deal. As a baseline, however, both Jpegmafia and RXK’s eccentricities and affects do dovetail with some of the “weirder” aspects of online, with RXK Nephew aligning more with schizoposters who make an aesthetic out of paranoia and conspiracies. Rap’s spent plenty of time trafficking in those two from Cell Therapy to Busta onward, but the relentless Youtube boosting and RXK’s (hilarious) tweeting transforms the context around RXK quite a bit, though the idea he’s a creature entirely of the present is silly and shows a lack of familiarity with the genre’s sweep outside of the last few years. But as far as lineages go, Jpeg’s use of references feels more like the “he doesn’t care WHOSE toes he steps on” Eminem singles of the early 2000s, or Tyler, the Creator before he decided to become a real life Handsome Boy Modeling Club member.
Rap has always had eyes towards the culture around it. When I first heard “Protect Ya Neck” when I was 16, I had no idea who Tevin Campbell was, but there’s a difference to responding to the culture around you by placing it in a more alien context, and posing yourself as a gnat to the monoculture.
Of course, I never think about this when “Burfict!” comes on my shuffle.
While we’re on the new music beat, so far Wednesday’s Rat Saw God is my favorite album of the year. Some of this is personal bias: Wednesday is from Asheville, North Carolina, a city that existed as evidence of another Appalachia for me as a teenager (I still have a deep fondness for it despite it becoming a city that’s half AirBNB). Their lyrics are a sort of dissociative couplets about burnout life in the rural south. Of course I enjoy an album that discusses a bunch of rat kids taking too much benadryl, resulting in one needing a stomach pump. It may be the only big indie album this year that references the Drive-By Truckers.
One of Eli’s arguments in the Constantly Hating piece (or resulting from it on Twitter) is that music is inextricable from its presentation. Following that logic, we could see Wednesday’s album release show in New York including a flea market as a cynical exploitative bit of trash authenticity. Beyond the fact that living in the rural south and enjoying mudding isn’t like Ja Morant pretending he’s from Zone 6, there’s a misunderstanding in that line of thought.
On Twitter, every so often you see people complain about “yee-haw” leftists (you might even get lucky enough to see me do it). And there is plenty to complain about, including its affectation of southern working class shibboleths. But there’s a crucial thing people ignore about it: the people who are taking Dolly Parton, Dale Earnhardt, and possums and draping them with anarchist/communist/socialist symbols are being sincere. We can discuss what level of condescension is available there, but what is actually going on there is an attempt to take the features of our cultural makeup and make them speak to our conditions. Because posting online is performance, what makes the “yee-haw leftist” annoying is the performance of being a yee-haw leftist. But from my vantage point of moving from the Appalachian south to Richmond, which sits in the Deregionalized zone and can be north or south based where you’re standing, there is an attempt to forge something new from the prior carapace.
While Wednesday’s music and themes do rely on indie rock standbys of ennui and lost love, the landscape that music inhabits is between the unevenly developed rural world and the coming future. It’s in that world where we might find the South redefined and finally wrest from its old Dixie trappings. In the meantime, there might be some memes none of us like.I will never publish a Substack “note”.